Labs front inconsitent behaviour when `adFree`

[ioannakok]

I've been experiencing an issue today and cannot figure out why. This link https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-labs-australia is showing two different fronts for me. The right one, when I am not logged in to the Guardian site and when I am logged in, it shows a stale front (articles from 2018).

[ioannakok]

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/19683595/173323675-7dee4d03-4a73-4237-baa5-e6e93afaba22.mov

[mxdvl]

This looks like a bug, as the following are working as expected even if signed-in:

• https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-labs
• https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-labs-us

[mxdvl]

Ongoing research to identify why the paid containers are skipped for this page. Potential areas of interest are :

• https://github.com/guardian/frontend/blob/main/common/app/views/fragments/containers/facia_cards/container.scala.html#L30
• https://github.com/guardian/frontend/blob/main/common/app/layout/FaciaContainer.scala#L163-L166
• https://github.com/guardian/frontend/blob/main/common/app/model/facia/PressedCollection.scala#L37-L43

[ioannakok]

@mxdvl Please leave a comment if there's anything else to add. Putting this back to TODO

[OllysCoding]

Picking this up to try and figure it out!

[OllysCoding]

I believe the start of the issue could stem from here: https://github.com/guardian/frontend/blob/main/facia/app/controllers/FaciaController.scala#L194

This logic says that if there are no collections in the 'ad free' variant of a front (which is prioritised for an ad-free user), then fall back to the normal variant.

The ad-free https://www.theguardian.com/guardian-labs-us has no collections:

Whereas the aus ad-free version does:

We can also see that the ad-free variant of the aus version is still being pressed by the updated time:

So it's likely that either in the configuration, history, or pressing of the article, something is wrong or misconfigured that's causing the ad-free variant of the article to be pressed with content we don't want.

[jlieb10]

Hi all, has this been merged/is there an associated PR?

[bryophyta]

this is in the In Progress column in the Rota board -- is it still in progress? If not, does it need to be picked up again?

cc. @ioannakok @OllysCoding